1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for image forming, and in particular, it relates to an apparatus and a method for image forming that store and print or display input documents or images.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become common practice for companies to convert documents printed on paper or the like into electronic form to challenge the information sharing and to solve the problem of storage space.
To generate image data, a document printed on plane paper is read by a scanner into electronic form, which requires a high-resolution image reading technique to ensure the reproducibility of the original print document.
Particularly, small characters written on an original lose their shape in image data read by a low-resolution scanner or the like, losing the reproducibility of the document.
Digitalized documents have an important meaning particularly when they are not only stored in the company or the like that read the documents but also transmitted to remote locations via communication networks. Digitalized documents are also important to share information via network communications.
Such transfer of electronic documents via communication lines has a limitation to communication speed because image data read with a high resolution, e.g., 600 dpi, is very large in file size. Particularly, large amounts of high-resolution data take a lot of time to transfer, thus sometimes hindering transfer in practice.
Accordingly, in the case of generating image data for network communications, electronic documents of small file size are generally generated by reading documents at low resolution of about 200 dpi.
Both of requirement for low resolution (small file size) and requirement for high resolution cannot be fully satisfied at the same time. However, solutions for individual applications are being tried.
For example, JP-A 10-233916 discloses a technique of efficiently generating low-resolution image data for display and high-resolution image data for printing.
As has been described above, image data for network communications is generally produced at low resolution of about 200 dpi in view of the size of files transmitted.
However, the low-resolution image data has low character reproducibility, having lower readability than that of high-resolution image data. This tendency is notable particularly for documents including small characters.
Accordingly, there is a strong demand for an image forming apparatus that can generate image data having high character reproducibility and readability while avoiding a decrease in communication speed by holding the file size as small as that of conventional low-resolution image data.